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Accountability is one of the most discussed, yet incorrectly applied, leadership attributes. Leaders work diligently toward promoting accountability, but few organizations are successful at hard-wiring personal accountability into their talent and everyday business operations. Leaders frequently promote accountability as classroom-trainable behavior, which leads to frustration when results and productivity remain stagnant.

Old Leadership Beliefs Are Expensive

There is growing awareness of leaders’ coaching strategies and their connection to productivity, and thus, leadership practices are a serious and critical economic issue. Conventional leadership wisdom promoted open door policies and formed human resources departments to make it safe to vent frustrations and accept employee opinions “to make work better.” Then we try to hold leaders accountable for the subsequent engagement survey results. This commonly held conventional wisdom is fundamentally flawed. Why? Accountability is an individual belief system. Accountability means death of the ego and open door policies. Venting is the ego’s way of avoiding self-reflection. We have told people for years that venting helps, if you need to get opinions off your chest, just come through our open door! Daily venting feels good; well, so does an ice cream binge, but it’s not a sustainable lifestyle. A leader’s primary mindset to hardwire accountability shouldn’t be, and cannot be, to hold employees accountable.

Old beliefs have inspired expensive attempts to perfect employees’ circumstances to drive up engagement scores and then create frameworks to "hold people accountable" for results. This approach actually creates and reinforces feelings of victimhood and leaves employees unprepared to adapt to real changes that are necessary for the health and profitability of their enterprises. Rather than driving performance and creating efficiencies, these outdated engagement programs fuel the emotional waste, entitlement and drama that drags down organizations. This is backwards and expensive.

According to New York Times best-selling author, Shawn Achor, 90% of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world. Therefore, trying to teach accountability and perfect employees’ circumstances through meeting demands in return for employee engagement is an insane practice. It’s a shortsighted strategy that won’t provide a long-term solution and is simply a waste of time and resources -- a high price to pay for busy leaders who are already short on both.

Bold New Leadership Thinking

A helpful tip for leaders is to understand that a highly accountable and resilient mindset is cultivated over time through challenging experiences, coaching and feedback, and self-reflection. Until that state is reached, individuals rely on ego. And the ego is the age equivalent of a two-year old. The ego can’t multi-task, both vent/judge and self-reflect, because it only thinks of itself. Think about it like this, you can drag a two-year old across the room with a toy if you attempt to grab the toy from his hand. So to disarm the two-year old of his toy (the ego), you can’t simply grab the toy away, you must replace the toy by offering him something else, like candy. So goes the ego. You can’t vent (toy) and be in self-reflection (candy) at the same time. Leaders can begin hardwiring accountability with thoughtful questions that promote self-reflection and thoughtful analysis to disarm the ego. Accountability means death to the ego.

A fundamental philosophy of Reality-Based Leadership is that accountability is a mindset that’s cultivated through coaching and self-reflection, and hardwiring accountability means coaching leaders that their role is to help others develop great mental processes needed to eliminate self-imposed suffering and choose to be accountable for driving results. This paradigm shift revolutionizes the leaders job as the role model for leading with an accountable mindset, and coaching others to do the same, to deliver desired results in their organization. Additionally, leaders begin with themselves -- they get neutral on the issues and focus on facts. Accountable feedback comes from accountable leaders. There is no room for collusion in feedback and coaching. Great leaders ask: What are you committing to? What could you have done differently to change the results? What choices did you make in the process that were helpful? What choices were harmful? What did you do to help?

Still confused if you or your employees embody personal accountability? Perhaps it’s easier to recognize its absence. Simply look for the presence of drama and entitlement.

What’s A Leader To Do?

While developing an accountable mindset is possible, changing a person who maintains a firmly developed victim mindset or succumbs to entitlement thinking is nearly impossible. Just as a personally accountable mindset takes years of effort to fully cultivate, so does the destructive victim mindset. Rather than trying to change individuals who suffer from a victim mindset, it’s better to make these employees someone else’s problem through performance management into external opportunities. This affords leaders all of their precious time and resources to support, encourage, engage and develop the able and willing, who maintain the potential to be highly accountable. If done correctly, your victims will catch on soon enough that they either need to sign up or sign out of the organization, leaving you with the lasting benefit of a highly accountable workforce, which serves as a magnet for complementary talent.

Accountability can be learned, but it is not easy to develop. Cultivating an accountable mindset takes time and intentional effort. It requires a relentless focus on self-development and an accountable, reality-based mentor who doesn’t let employees off the hook when it comes to accounting for results.

I am a drama researcher, international keynote speaker, business consultant, and New York Times bestselling author advocating a revolutionary new approach to leadership called Reality-Based Leadership. My goal is to help leaders and organizations thrive despite the circumsta...